David Umber is "a man fleeing the past as well as pursuing it." He gets in a lot of hot water along the way -- so much that it looks like there's no way out. Worse, he fears he is pulling others down with him, a familiar feeling for this sensitive and traumatized man.
The story begins at the ancient stone circle of Avebury, where neolithic people built a henge. The history of this stone circle, like that of many other henges in the UK, has been obscured by time.
Goddard describes the ancient settlement as "a landscape where the unexplained and the inexplicable lie still and close, where man-made markers of a remote past mock the set and ordered world that is merely the flickering, fast-fleeing present."
Even so, what began on that warm Avebury afternoon was "of an order that did not allow for genuine forgetting." Many years later, it remains in the mind of David Umber, "simply there, always, pulling him back, dragging him down." This memory has become the dominant fact of his life, and all he can do in the face of it is to refine his "tactics of evasion."
Umber keeps well away from anything that might remind him, until he is sought out by the retired policeman George Sharp, who appears at his obscure hideout in Prague. That's when Umber, the failed historian, begins to unearth the part of his own past that he has tried so hard to bury.
George Sharp has new information on an ancient case. Now retired from the police force, he is no longer obliged to abide by its rules. A man with a mission, he wants Umber as an ally.
Sharp understands Umber's reluctance to reopen old wounds. In an effort to make the task easier, he invites his associate to re-frame the passage of time not as a disadvantage, but as "a blessing" that will help them unveil the mystery. Time, says the old copper, reveals a pattern, and uncovering that pattern can lead to the truth.
Making an effort to overcome his unwillingness, David Umber does what he knows he must. He follows Sharp into the minefield of memories. The death of David's ex-wife Sally was found by the coroner to be an accident, but was it really? Could it have been suicide, or worse?
Sally's best friend Alice, a veteran of the Greenham Common protest, doesn't trust the authorities. On the day of Sally's funeral, Edmund Quested chose not to pass on a certain phone message, considering this an act of protection.
David Umber must rake up all this and more, because, as he reminds an unwilling Alice she once told him, "the right thing to do is the only thing to do." With this idea, he perseveres in what he has come to see as a necessary quest. Reconnecting with the Junius papers, his original PhD research subject, brings him a small glimmering of hope.
As he sets out for the Staffordshire records office to check up on a historic detail, he is conscious of an inner shift. "Too often in the past, he had failed to follow his instincts." Now he is determined that he will. This decision brings him to Henry Griffin, the brother of the man who failed to show up for an appointment in Avebury twenty years before.
When Umber realizes that this information is another blind alley, he nearly falls into despair. But progress becomes possible again in the form of an unexpected invitation to see someone who's been avoiding him. "He could not ignore the summons. He could not resist the bait."
In this final effort, he breaks through to a truth that helps to set him free. For the first time since the original tragedy, David Umber glimpses a fragile hope of true and lasting inner peace.
As usual, Robert Goddard provides a satisfyingly nuanced and multi-layered tale with sympathetic and believable characters. He also keeps the reader guessing till the very end.
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